Middle East

May. 02, 2018 | 05:53 PM

Red Cross chief sees Syria aid shift towards 'rehabilitation'

Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross ICRC, speaks about the ICRC's work addressing a wide range of crises, including in Syria, Myanmar and Yemen, at the European headquarters of the United Nations, in Geneva, Switzerland, Wednesday, May 2, 2018. (Martial Trezzini/Keystone via AP)

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Providing humanitarian aid in war-ravaged Syria looks set to shift increasingly away from emergency, life-saving assistance towards rehabilitating devastated areas to help Syrians return home, the head of the Red Cross said Wednesday.

Syria has been torn apart a war that has left more than 350,000 people dead and displaced millions.

But Maurer said that as the situation in many parts of the country appears to be stabilising, he expected to see a shift away from a pure focus on emergency assistance towards reestablishing services in areas people want to return to.

Despite a relative calm in a number of places across the country, Maurer stressed that "humanitarian assistance (must) continue to go into Syria, because ... there are a lot of humanitarian needs".

But he said the nature of the assistance would evolve in many places away from pure emergency assistance towards "protection activities".